According to estimates from Catalist, the Democratic data firm, 10 percent of voters under 30 chose a third-party candidate eight years ago, compared to 8 percent of voters 30-44, 5 percent of those 45-64 and 3 percent of voters 65 and older.
This year’s polls are clearly picking up broad dissatisfaction with Biden among young voters, even if they don’t uniformly show Trump gaining ground. The Split Ticket poll shows both Biden (68 percent) and Trump (70 percent) are viewed unfavorably by more than two-thirds of young voters — but, notably, Trump’s “very unfavorable” figure of 61 percent is significantly higher than Biden’s 44 percent.
The young voters Biden needs to win include the 24 percent who have a “somewhat unfavorable” view of him.
Biden’s senior moment
While Biden is bleeding support among young voters, the nation’s oldest-ever president might just be shoring up his standing with seniors.
That would be a shift from the general — though imperfect — trend of political evolution: Voters become more conservative as they age.
The latest New York Times/Siena College national poll, conducted in late February, showed Biden with a 9-point lead over Trump among likely voters 65 and older, 51 percent to 42 percent — even as Trump led the overall survey by 4 points.
And it’s not just in the horserace with Trump. While traditionally Democratic younger voters are more likely to say they disapprove of Biden’s job performance right now, older voters — even though they lean more Republican on the whole — aren’t.
“We’ve certainly seen in our older folks that they are leaning a little bit more to Biden,” said Don Levy, the director of the Siena College Research Institute. “Even on Biden approval, older folks in our most recent national [survey] are break-even on Biden job approval, despite the fact that the country as a whole is 25 points negative, and young people are 38 points negative on Biden approval.”
Symptoms of a broader realignment
The shifts along the opposite ends of the age spectrum could actually be part of a broader realignment along racial, class and gender lines.
Polls show Trump running stronger than he did in 2020 among Black and Latino voters, while Biden is holding his own with white voters, who tilted toward Trump last time. Generally speaking, white voters tend to skew older than other groups, particularly Latinos — who, especially as a share of the electorate, are younger.
Those numbers could be real — or they could be artifacts of a polling error that will only be discovered after the election. And the shifts could come from subgroups that intersect with each other, like age, class and race.
Della Volpe, the Kennedy School pollster and young voter expert, said the public poll numbers for Hispanic voters, especially young ones, are “all over the place.” Levy, the Siena pollster, said the entirety of Biden’s slippage with Black voters is coming from young Black voters — older Black voters continue to overwhelmingly back the Democrat.
There’s also the gender gap: Trump is openly courting young men across races and ethnicities, and there’s some evidence he’s gaining ground there, while young women remain in Biden’s camp.
The next seven months will offer more data about the continuously shifting coalitions. But don’t hold your breath wondering about whether these changes are real. The debate likely won’t even end on Nov. 5, even with voter surveys like the network exit polls or AP VoteCast.
It will then take weeks, even months, for the gold-standard post-election analyses of voter files or the Cooperative Election Study that will provide some of the answers — well after the next president is named or even inaugurated.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this report misstated the year of George H.W. Bush’s presidential election victory. It was 1988.
